31 July, 2016

After
another report, this time by the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office
(IEO), exposing IMF's lethal "mistakes" who led to the
destruction of national economies, it was confirmed that "technical
expertise" of the Fund not only used by the European Financial Dictatorship officials to save their
currency and banks, but also to finish the Greek experiment in order
to expand it throughout eurozone.

The
International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board,
made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became
euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs
of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental
concept of currency theory.

This is
the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s
tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most
damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions.

[...]

The
report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes
above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It
answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from
Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European
Union insiders used the fund to rescue their own rich currency
union and banking system.

[...]

The
report said the whole approach to the eurozone was characterised
by “groupthink” and intellectual capture. They had no
fall-back plans on how to tackle a systemic crisis in the eurozone
– or how to deal with the politics of a multinational currency
union – because they had ruled out any possibility that it could
happen.

[...]

The IMF
persistently played down the risks posed by ballooning current
account deficits and the flood of capital pouring into the
eurozone periphery, and neglected the danger of a "sudden
stop" in capital flows.

[...]

While the
fund’s actions were understandable in the white heat of the
crisis, the harsh truth is that the bailout sacrificed Greece in a
“holding action” to save the euro and north European banks.
Greece endured the traditional IMF shock of austerity, without the
offsetting IMF cure of debt relief and devaluation to restore
viability.

A
sub-report on the Greek saga said the country was forced to go
through a staggering squeeze, equal to 11pc of GDP over the first
three years. This set off a self-feeding downward spiral. The
worse it became, the more Greece was forced to cut – what
ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called "fiscal
water-boarding".

[...]

The IMF
thought the fiscal multiplier was 0.5 when it may in reality have
been five times as high, given the fragility of the Greek system.
The result is that nominal GDP ended 25pc lower than the IMF’s
projections, and unemployment soared to 25pc instead of 15pc as
expected.

[...]

The injustice is that the cost of
the bailouts was switched to ordinary Greek citizens – the
least able to support the burden – and it was never
acknowledged that the true motive of EU-IMF Troika policy was to
protect monetary union. Indeed, the Greeks were repeatedly blamed
for failures that stemmed from the policy itself. This unfairness
– the root of so much bitterness in Greece – is finally
recognised in the report.

On the
occasion of this new report which puts the final nail to the coffin
of the IMF reliability, Greece's former Minister of Finance, Yanis
Varoufakis, unleashed a fierce attack against the EFD/IMF mafia on
twitter:

“In the
script according to the eurozone, the expected ending is: Syriza
splits; finance minister Varoufakis makes good his pledge not to sign
a surrender and resigns. A government of the centre-left forms, with
Alexis Tsipras now allied to the centrist Potami party and with tacit
support from a liberal wing of the New Democracy party. Debt relief
happens, but on the terms dictated by the lenders, and Syriza
survives to complete its mutation into a centre-left social
democratic party.”

Also,
the Greek opposition proposed recently an
Examination Committee to investigate the causes behind the
introduction of capital controls in the summer of 2015, the third
bailout agreement and the need for a new bank recapitalization: “New
Democracy’s proposal calls for the formation of an Examination
Committee to investigate the causes behind the introduction of
capital controls in the summer of 2015, the third bailout agreement
and the need for a new bank recapitalization. According to a report
in major Greek newspaper Ta Nea, the main opposition party will also
call for an investigation of “Plan X” that former Minister of
Finance Yanis Varoufakis composed, should Greece had been forced out
of the euro zone, and Mr. Galbraith revealed in a book recently.”

Meaning
that the Greek opposition, completely devoted to Troika's neoliberal
policies, wanted to "crucify" Varoufakis because he tried
to build an emergency plan in case that Greece's creditors would put
the country in the corner as they eventually did through the
financial coup in summer 2015!

Of
course, the opposition miraculously "erased" all the
previous years since 2010, marking the most devastating period for
the Greek economy under the New Democracy - PASOK coalition
government that implemented the IMF policies of destruction. It
didn't bother, as expected, to request an Examination Committee for
that period.

30 July, 2016

On
March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for 30,322
emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton's
private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547
pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of
the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made
available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department
as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs
were made available on February 29, 2016.

A letter
from Clintons'
top advisor Sidney Blumenthal
to Hillary Clinton in 2010, describes his conversation with former
Vice Chancellor of Germany, Joschka Fischer (director of the Nabucco
pipeline project at that time*,
as noted in the letter), on Iran, Saudi Arabia issues.

It appears
that, at that time, "harsh, targeted sanctions" against
Iran were "absolutely necessary" according to the US
establishment and its Western allies.

However,
Blumenthal pointed that “A purely condign
sanctions strategy can contribute to the regime's will to punish and
tighten repression. Talking of regime change, of course, undermines
the cause of regime change. It is a gift to the regime. The
opposition is a new factor in the Iran equation that must be taken
into account on the political and moral level. Pushed to the wall,
the regime may feel compelled to repress, which might involve
thousands or tens of thousands of political killings.”

Yet, the
most interesting part comes at the end of the letter with Fischer's
view on "Saudi bomb":

“On
Saudi Arabia, Fischer points out that if
Iran develops nuclear weaponry the Saudis already
have their own bomb. The Saudis invested in Pakistan's nuclear
weaponry partly for this eventuality; that's their bomb in reserve.”

This is a
characteristic example of how the brutal Saudi regime is treated by
the West compared to the Iranian government. The Iranians are treated
as a dangerous regime, apparently because they are considered
Russia's allies, and pushed to the edge in order to abandon their
nuclear program. At the same time, it has been proved that the
Westerners knew that the Saudis had already invested on "proxy"
nuclear weaponry through Pakistan.

A few years
later, Iran reached a deal with the US paying the price of a strict
surveillance concerning its nuclear program, but no one bothers to
deal with the Saudi regime who supported Daesh in Syria, together
with Turkey, bringing absolute mess in the Middle East.

Consider
that the US were forced to make a deal with Iran, partly because they
probably thought that they could "use" it to clean up the
mess in Middle East together with Russia, Hezbollah and the Kurds.
Indeed: Barbarians
- fools - hypocrites to the bone ...

*In 2009, Fischer took a post as adviser to the
Nabucco pipeline project, in which the German RWE company is also
involved. According to media reports, the “six-digit salary”
consultancy contract has already been signed.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer]

On Friday,
three senior Irish bankers were jailed for up to three-and-a-half
years for their conspiracy to defraud investors, subsequently causing
the economic collapse of 2008.

According to
a report in Reuters, the trio will be among the first senior bankers
globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during
the crisis. Watching these criminal bankers use the governments of
the world to fleece the taxpayers in a series of bailouts and scams
to defraud the people has been infuriating.

[...]

Unlike the
bankers who remain protected in America’s legal system, the Irish
have decided to lay down the law.

“By
means that could be termed dishonest, deceitful and corrupt they
manufactured 7.2 billion euros in deposits by obvious sham
transactions,” Judge Martin Nolan told the court, describing
the conspiracy as a “very serious crime”. “The public
is entitled to rely on the probity of blue chip firms. If we can’t
rely on the probity of these banks we lose all hope or trust in
institutions,” said Nolan.

In the
United States, the people have been forced to file their own legal
action against the criminal bankers as the government does absolutely
nothing to stop their crimes.

[...]

Until the
people wake up to the atrocities being carried out against them by
criminal bankers who control the government, this fleecing of the
citizenry will continue. To all those who bank with any of these huge
banks — pull your money out today, move it to a local bank, or find
another alternative.

Failing to
do so only sustains their criminal behavior. Please share this story
with your friends and family as it will most assuredly be a mere blip
on their televisions and deliberately easy to miss.

Five
middle-distance runners from South Sudan, until recently living in
Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, to take part in first-ever Refugee
Olympic Team.

Amid tears
of joy, farewell hugs and songs of encouragement a group of smiling
young refugee African athletes flew out of Nairobi today bound for
the Rio Olympics in Brazil and an appointment with history.

Five
middle-distance runners from South Sudan, until recently living in
Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya’s inhospitable far north, were given
a rousing send-off from friends, fellow refugees and Kenyan
well-wishers. The five will join five others from Syria, Democratic
Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia to make history by taking part in
the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team.

“I feel
very excited. This is the first chance for the refugees to
participate in the Olympics and to give us hope, for us to encourage
the young generations of fellow refugees who are remaining in the
camps maybe to continue their talent,” Rose Nathike Lokonyen,
23, told UNHCR in an interview prior to departure.

Hillary
Clinton ignored advice to punish Honduran businesses for backing the
2009 coup and helped push the elected President Manuel Zelaya out of
Honduran politics, an investigation by teleSUR into WikiLeaks
documents show.

Despite
insistence from her director of policy planning, Anne Marie
Slaughter, that she define Zelaya’s ousting by the military as a
military coup and that she “make noises about prohibiting U.S.
companies from doing business with companies" controlled by
the leaders, revealed in emails published by WikiLeaks, Clinton did
neither.

“I got
lots of signals last week that we are losing ground in Latin America
every day the Honduras crisis continues; high level people from both
the business and the NGO community say that even our friends are
beginning to think we are not really committed to the norm of
constitutional democracy we have worked so hard to build over the
last 20 years,” wrote Slaughter two months after the coup. “I
am willing to take additional steps but I'd like them to be fully
vetted,” was Clinton’s one-line response.

While
Clinton did move to suspend the visas of those in the de facto
military government three months after the coup, as Slaughter
requested, she kept close ties with the business community. Previous
investigations into her leaked emails revealed that she even
consulted Lanny Davis of the Honduran chapter of the Business Council
of Latin America, which supported the coup.

El Salvador
runs the risk of seeing the reemergence of death squads as the
government pursues a hardline approach in its efforts to tackle
violent crime in the Central American country, national human rights
ombudsman David Morales told EFE.

2015 saw a
record level of homicides in the Central American country and the
nation has already registered 3,050 violent deaths in the first six
months of this year, the bloodiest period of the last decade.

Violent
crime is attributed mostly to the country's armed gangs, known as
maras, which were born in the United States but grew in size and
power inside El Salvador when many of its members were deported from
the U.S. back to Central America.

In light of
the violence, the government of President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a
former leftist guerrilla, launched a militarized offensive against
the gangs. The government effort is showing signs of success, with
homicides down 51 percent in June 2016 compared to the year before.

However,
according to Morales a lack of internal discipline in the security
forces, a high tolerance for abuses and the war-like tone of
discourse about crime in El Salvador creates an environment that
favors the reemergence of death squads.

Up to
million people could be forced to flee their homes in Iraq in coming
weeks and months as fighting intensifies to retake the city of Mosul
from Islamic State, the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) said on Friday.

The
humanitarian agency said it was seeking a further 17.1 million Swiss
francs for its program in Iraq, its third largest worldwide, bringing
its budget for the country to $137 million Swiss francs.

“Hundreds
of thousands of people may very well be on the move in the coming
weeks and months, seeking shelter and assistance,” said Robert
Mardini, ICRC director for the Near and Middle East on return from
Iraq.

The
former Finance Minister of Greece and head of the DiEm25 movement,
Yiannis Varoufakis, answered in a Q&A organized by
ThePressProject. The public posed questions to Mr. Varoufakis through
Facebook

The
procedure took place at the same moment when another, relevant
procedure was unfolding in the Greek parliament; the main opposition
party submitted a proposal for the creation of an investigating
committee regarding the negotiation between the Greek government and
its international lenders in 2015. As is known, the former minister
played a key role in those negotiations while he resigned from the
government right after their end and the subsequent agreement of a
new bailout/lending deal.

Varoufakis
revealed that DiEm25 will take part in the next Greek elections, in a
form that its members will decide. He also plans to publicize the
minutes of the Eurogroup meetings in which he was present.

[...]

“Personally,
I think that all European council meetings should be recorded and
available to European citizens. This is also part of the DiEM25
mandate. During those Eurogroup meetings where I was participating, I
was probably the only one who respected confidentiality without
publicizing what was said despite the leaks from the Troika side,
leaks which were often toxic and falsified. Shortly, within the
context of narrating the Athens Spring thriller, I will submit my
view on what happened and I will also submit the minutes of those
meetings. My aim is not to replay the past. Today, the present and
the future are pushing. The dead-end against which we fought in 2015
is now even bigger. Whatever we do from now on, will have to consider
the future of the country and Europe”.

During the
occupation of Iraq U.S. intelligence and military services contracted
CACI International Inc, a U.S. company in Virginia, to provide
"intelligence services" in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
CACI employees were directly involved in torturing Iraqi prisoners.

The U.S.
army recently contracted CACI for "intelligence analysis
services" in Syria. The Syrian government has not invited or
otherwise allowed U.S. military or its contractors within its
country. Any such activities infringe on Syrian sovereignty and are
thereby in violation of international law.

[...]

Islamic
State media just released video from inside a camp in Jordan which
shows U.S. personal providing military and intelligence training to
anti-Syrian-government "rebels". This suggests that the
Islamic State penetrated, one way or another, a U.S. training camp in
Jordan. It thereby benefits from such U.S. military training and
intelligence activities in and around Syria.

27 July, 2016

On
March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for 30,322
emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton's
private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547
pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of
the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made
available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department
as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs
were made available on February 29, 2016.

A letter
from Clintons' top advisor Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton in 2009, shows that the
US establishment was deeply concerned about Cameron's unwillingness
to align with further European unification.

The
neoliberal globalists were deeply concerned about Tories'
old-fashioned neoliberalism
even before his election as prime minister. Eventually, Cameron did
the job as he re-elected by promising a referendum to the British,
although he was forced (as Jeremy Corbyn) by the globalists to take a
clear position against Brexit.

Which shows
that the British people grabbed the chance and marked a significant
victory against the global neoliberal establishment despite its
powerful mechanisms and against the odds.

Without
passing "Go," David Cameron has seriously damaged his
relations with the European leaders. Sending a letter to Czech leader
Vaclav Klaus encouraging him not to sign the Lisbon Treaty, as though
Cameron were already Prime Minister, he has offended Sarkozy, Merkel
and Zapatero.

Within the
Conservative Party the Shadow Foreign Minister William Hague has
arduously pressured for an anti-EU stance, despite his assurances to
you that Tory policy toward Europe would be marked by continuity.

Cameron has
attempted to straddle factions, fending off calls for a national
referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. But this letter is proof positive of
his tilt to the Tory right on Europe.

The European
leaders understand that the letter signals his future policy and are
reacting accordingly. Cameron's presumptive strike has accelerated
the predicted Tory-European split from post-election to pre-election.
Whether this affects Merkel's attitude on Blair and the EU presidency
remains unclear, but Cameron's high-handed behavior is precisely the
sort of thing that provokes her.

As Hillary
Clinton puts together what she hopes will be a winning coalition in
November, many progressives remain wary — but she has the war-hawks
firmly behind her.

“I
would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are
anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group
gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy
professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I
would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for
Hillary.”

As the
co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New
American Century, Kagan played a leading role in pushing for
America’s unilateral invasion of Iraq, and insisted for years
afterwards that it had turned out great.

Despite the
catastrophic effects of that war, Kagan insisted at last week’s
fundraiser that U.S. foreign policy over the last 25 years has been
“an extraordinary success.”

Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump’s know-nothing isolationism has
led many neocons to flee the Republican ticket. And some, like Kagan,
are actively helping Clinton, whose hawkishness in many ways
resembles their own.

Perhaps Bernie wants to make sure
that Hillary will stay to the left. He may become an extra pair of
strict political eyes on her. Hillary would find even more
difficult to escape and follow the neocon/neoliberal agenda,
especially when she knows that millions of Americans who are got
sick of the establishment will be watching her closely.

There
is no doubt of course that Hillary will abandon immediately any
pro-people policies once (if) she get elected, and follow
faithfully the neocon/neoliberal agenda. Obama has an additional
reason to turn 180 degrees to appear that he fully supports a
stronger social security. Now that his term is ending, he simply
wants to leave a good name behind.

David
Harvey on what neoliberalism actually is — and why the concept
matters.

Eleven
years ago, David Harvey published A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
now one of the most cited books on the subject. The years since have
seen new economic and financial crises, but also of new waves of
resistance, which themselves often target “neoliberalism” in
their critique of contemporary society.

Cornel
West speaks of the Black Lives Matter movement as “an indictment of
neoliberal power”; the late Hugo Chávez called neoliberalism a
“path to hell”; and labor leaders are increasingly using the term
to describe the larger environment in which workplace struggles
occur. The mainstream press has also picked up the term, if only to
argue that neoliberalism doesn’t actually exist.

But
what, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about neoliberalism?
Is it a useful target for socialists? And how has it changed since
its genesis in the late twentieth century?

Bjarke
Skærlund Risager, a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy and
History of Ideas at Aarhus University, sat down with David Harvey to
discuss the political nature of neoliberalism, how it has transformed
modes of resistance, and why the Left still needs to be serious about
ending capitalism.

The
ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named
Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far,
that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize
the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

Ideas were
also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time
was that universities were impossible to organize because the student
movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they
set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the
Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought
in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side
economics.

The idea was
to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did —
for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a
privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough
research. This research would then be published independently and it
would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and
infiltrate the universities.

This process
took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t
need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities
have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects
surrounding them.

With respect
to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with
global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for
example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian
labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of
dissatisfaction and unrest.

Instead they
chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor
forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs
and empower finance capital |8|, because finance capital is the most
mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating
currencies became critical to curbing labor.

At the same
time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created
unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs
abroad, and a third component: technological change,
deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the
strategy to squash labor.

It was an
ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what
neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think
the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion
bit by bit.

I don’t
think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they
just intuitively said, “We gotta crush labor, how do we do it?”
And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which
would support that.

[...]

What’s
missing here is the way in which the capitalist class orchestrated
its efforts during the 1970s and early 1980s. I think it would be
fair to say that at that time — in the English-speaking world
anyway — the corporate capitalist class became pretty unified.

They agreed
on a lot of things, like the need for a political force to really
represent them. So you get the capture of the Republican Party, and
an attempt to undermine, to some degree, the Democratic Party.

From the
1970s the Supreme Court made a bunch of decisions that allowed the
corporate capitalist class to buy elections more easily than it could
in the past.

For example,
you see reforms of campaign finance that treated contributions to
campaigns as a form of free speech. There’s a long tradition in the
United States of corporate capitalists buying elections but now it
was legalized rather than being under the table as corruption.

Overall I
think this period was defined by a broad movement across many fronts,
ideological and political. And the only way you can explain that
broad movement is by recognizing the relatively high degree of
solidarity in the corporate capitalist class. Capital reorganized its
power in a desperate attempt to recover its economic wealth and its
influence, which had been seriously eroded from the end of the 1960s
into the 1970s.

[...]

One of big
moves of neoliberalization was throwing out all the Keynesians from
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1982 — a
total clean-out of all the economic advisers who held Keynesian
views.

They were
replaced by neoclassical supply-side theorists and the first thing
they did was decide that from then on the IMF should follow a policy
of structural adjustment whenever there’s a crisis anywhere.

In 1982,
sure enough, there was a debt crisis in Mexico. The IMF said, “We’ll
save you.” Actually, what they were doing was saving the New York
investment banks and implementing a politics of austerity.

The
population of Mexico suffered something like a 25 percent loss of its
standard of living in the four years after 1982 as a result of the
structural adjustment politics of the IMF.

Since then
Mexico has had about four structural adjustments. Many other
countries have had more than one. This became standard practice.

What are
they doing to Greece now? It’s almost a copy of what they did to
Mexico back in 1982, only more savvy. This is also what happened in
the United States in 2007–8. They bailed out the banks and made the
people pay through a politics of austerity.

[...]

The other
thing I think is crucial is that the neoliberal push of the 1970s
didn’t pass without strong resistance. There was massive resistance
from labor, from communist parties in Europe, and so on.

But I would
say that by the end of the 1980s the battle was lost. So to the
degree that resistance has disappeared, labor doesn’t have the
power it once had, solidarity among the ruling class is no longer
necessary for it to work.

It doesn’t
have to get together and do something about struggle from below
because there is no threat anymore. The ruling class is doing
extremely well so it doesn’t really have to change anything.

Yet while
the capitalist class is doing very well, capitalism is doing rather
badly. Profit rates have recovered but reinvestment rates are
appallingly low |18|, so a lot of money is not circulating back into
production and is flowing into land-grabs and asset-procurement
instead.

[...]

I think it’s
possible that you can make a better capitalism than that which
currently exists. But not by much.

The
fundamental problems are actually so deep right now that there is no
way that we are going to go anywhere without a very strong
anticapitalist movement. So I would want to put things in
anticapitalist terms rather than putting them in anti-neoliberal
terms.

And I think
the danger is, when I listen to people talking about
anti-neoliberalism, that there is no sense that capitalism is itself,
in whatever form, a problem.

Most
anti-neoliberalism fails to deal with the macro-problems of endless
compound growth — ecological, political, and economic problems. So
I would rather be talking about anticapitalism than
anti-neoliberalism.